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How Often Do You Power Down Your Linux System?

How often do you actually shut down your Linux desktops/laptops (servers excluded for the obvious reason)? Do you power down when you’re not using it, every evening when you are done, or never – unless a power outage happens? What do you recommend? I used to never shut down but I find myself doing it more and more, at least every couple of days. I'm also not talking about rebooting; I'm talking about powering down and keeping it powered down for a little bit.

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I power down whenever I'm not using it for more than 20 minutes or so.
Less energy used = few power stations. Turn off unused gear, people.
I'll be willing to bet that's the far most important criterion?

Our RHEL servers are rarely shut down and only when a reboot is required
after a kernel update or physical maintenance is to be done to a server.
The last time I rebooted one of them it had been over 500 days since the
last reboot.

I use a System-76 Bonobo "laptop" (Mint 14, about to go to 16) for almost everything, and really only shut it down if I'm taking it somewhere. If I need something "light" to go then I use an Acer ChromeBook, and that hasn't been powered off since I bought it in December 2013!

Every evening when finished working / playing. Used to leave all our
systems powered on 24/7 running Folding@home or other distributed
computing applications (even Seti for a long time) however the cost of
electricity got to be silly and we couldn't justify / afford 24/7 any
more.

So, whilst aware that Linux is more able to withstand 24/7 operation
our systems still have to go to sleep when we do :-)

Reading you post again, I can see that you are not asking about "bragging
rights".
If you are shutting down to get rid of a problem, e.g. memory leak then I
suggest you investigate the issue rather.
Unix systems are designed to NOT need shutdowns.
In Windows, a shutdown may well fix a problem. In Linux it will not remove
the issue - on restarting, the issue will almost certainly remain.
If it has gone, there will always have been an option of fixing the issue
without a reboot.

This is a much better practice - since you can get to the root of the issue
- a restart treats the symptoms, not the cause.
The catch here is that often the "hot fix" will require more in-depth
knowledge than what is usually provided in the GUI.
That is to say, you may need to use the command line and troll through
logs, possibly even look at running processes and memory space.
If you are an intrepid fearless enthusiast, this can provide hours of
educational entertainment ;-)

What is your reason for "doing it more and more?" Is it just a habit? Is it
for conservation purposes?
That is fine then - but if it is to "fix stuff" then I suggest a new
approach.

My own server won't do this; UPS with monitoring. Power goes off, computer stays on, UPS tells it there's a problem, it shuts down cleanly when UPS says it's got only three minutes left. Save a bit of load on the UPS by not powering things that don't need to be on for a clean shutdown, like the monitor, KVM, USB stuff other than storage (ie scanner), etc.

I use full disk encryption using LUKS. I generally power it down when I don't intend to use it for a while. Until LUKS gets a Fricosu key (a separate key which causes LUKS to silently and permanently erase the real decryption key while under duress in Colorado), I'm not going to leave it running all the time.

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